I was talking with my coach about LED signs and he said he wanted to make a sort of hype robot. He said wants lights on the sides that are screens that will react to sound and Fire Up or something like that. The part I don't know is if hooking the LED matrix panels from Adafruit to the RoboRio is possible and whether it will work. Here is a link to the specific type of LED matrix: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1484 .

All the example I have found online for these boards are with arduinos or raspberry pis but since we'll be using a RoboRio anyways it'd be awesome if we could figure out how to do this.

It looks like it might work with the DIO pins. The data logic level input says 5v so I think it's compatible. I don't know if you would need a resistor, but I would power it directly from the VRM instead of the rio.

As for code, you would probably have to write a wrapper on the DigitalOutput class if you are using Java. The LEDs aren't controlled by PWM signal and instead seem to rely on on/off switching.

Keep in mind that these displays are designed to be driven by FPGAs or other high speed processors: they do not have built in PWM control of any kind. Instead, you're supposed to redraw the screen over and over to 'manually' PWM the whole thing.

TL;DR - probably possible, but definitely not recommended. Save your RIO processing power for running your actual robot. Set up an Arduino, Beaglebone, or other processor to drive the images you want. Then, use something (I2C/SPI/Serial/CAN/etc.) to send commands from the RIO to the other processor to control the image to taste.

TL;DR - probably possible, but definitely not recommended. Save your RIO processing power for running your actual robot. Set up an Arduino, Beaglebone, or other processor to drive the images you want. Then, use something (I2C/SPI/Serial/CAN/etc.) to send commands from the RIO to the other processor to control the image to taste.

This won't be a competition robot it will essentially be a plybot with leds to make a display for football game cheers etc.

It looks like it might work with the DIO pins. The data logic level input says 5v so I think it's compatible. I don't know if you would need a resistor, but I would power it directly from the VRM instead of the rio.

As for code, you would probably have to write a wrapper on the DigitalOutput class if you are using Java. The LEDs aren't controlled by PWM signal and instead seem to rely on on/off switching.

If I used the DIO pins on the roboRio would I need to use the jumper wire method in order to put the wires in the correct place on the DIO or should the ribbon cable from the matrix board just line up correctly with the DIO?

The main roadblock with hooking up an Adafruit LED matrix to a roboRIO would be on the programming side. I'm not aware of any libraries for Adafruit's matrices for roboRio's. I'm sure it would be quite the learning experience to implement one yourself! I can definitely vouch for Adafruit's excellent Arduino libraries. We've been having fun toting around an Adafruit 1484 matrix on some of our robots for the past few years and relied on an Adruino to draw images off an SD card.

We've experience with this. Definitely do with a coprocessor. You can talk to the coprocessor from the Rio over ethernet. You can run Falcon Player on a BeagleBone, and make http requests to the BB to change what's happening. It's hacky, but works. It's also easy to get the initial setup on the panels working; then all the pain is between the Rio and the BB....

There is a team we were pitted next to in 2016(?) at World's that had a coprocessor on the bot, and had written a PyGame driver for the panels, which made them *very* accessible to new programmers. I don't have contact information for them anymore (probably), but other people have had the idea: go googling for some libraries. If you go down to this level, you can do about anything, interface-wise.

We used ws2812b panels and used a Teensy Micro to drive them. It stored animations as "cues" and the roborio communicated to change the cues with i2c. I liked the design because it freed up processing time on the rio and ws2812b s are all over ebay and amazon.